A Conversation with Naomi Kanakia

Her new novel, "The Default World," is out now

I first discovered Naomi Kanakia, as I find most talented writers these days, on Substack. In her eclectic newsletter, Women of Letters, she can be found expounding on the history of Hinduism, the sociology of literature, Tolstoy, and whatever else might interest her and will certainly interest you. She has started to publish original and very engaging short fiction there. Not long ago, I was excited to see her new novel, The Default World, was also being published, and she would be traveling to New York to promote it. Kanakia has published young adult novels, but this was her first for adults. It does not disappoint. A withering satire of Bay Area tech culture and its many pieties, it calls to mind Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens and the great social novels of yore. The underemployed Jhanvi makes her way to San Francisco, where she hopes to drum up the cash for her gender-affirming surgeries. Jhanvi’s plan is straightforward: convince a wealthy techie to marry her and use their benefits to fund her transition. She finds her mark in Henry, an old college lover who now makes a comfortable six-figures in tech and belongs to a hedonistic (and neurotic) collective of young, wealthy, and sex-obsessed San Franciscans who are trying to transform an old warehouse into a dungeon for parties and orgies. Jhanvi is able to move into their house, where she immediately arouses suspicion, though she’s able to progress further with her plan because the socially liberal occupants decide they can’t simply evict a trans person. The Default World, thankfully, is neither “woke” nor “anti-woke” even as it skewers millenial culture. Kanakia, who has spoken of her own experience as a trans writer, is most interested in the ambiguities and tensions of daily existence that literature is best at addressing. Below is my interview with her, part of a recurring series with writers who are making their mark on the contemporary scene.

1. How did The Default World come to be? How did you conceive of the idea for the novel, how long did it take to write, and how did you end up selling it to a publisher?

There are a lot of novels about "female friendship," and there's a lot of media about the very strong platonic bond that women can form. Personally, I've always idealized female friendship and felt very locked-out from it, and I think that's common for a lot of women! You come to the big city hoping to find your ride-or-die friend posse, and it just...doesn't happen. All around, you see people living beautiful, glamorous lives, and none of them want anything to do with you. I wrote the first draft of the book in, I think, 2018? I sent it to my agent at the time, and he liked it and wanted to send it out immediately. Then I sent it to a female friend of mine for comments, and she wrote back a very strong letter, saying it was appropriative and redolent of the male gaze. I'm trans, so I decided fuck it, I would make the novel be about a trans woman instead of a cisgender one. When I sent the rewritten book back to my agent (with a trans protagonist), he said that he didn't care for it, and that he didn't think he could sell it. 

That's the kind of anecdote that few on Substack would believe—they hate the notion that by changing your protagonist from a white cisgender woman to a brown trans woman, you might've made the book less salable. The truth is that diversity is usually a strong selling point (I've made it work very well for me in the YA space), but you need to write the kind of book that the diversity audience will love (i.e. one where a lovable QPOC hero triumphs over a bunch of repulsive white people)—and my book was more complex and uncomfortable than that. In fact, when it was eventually published my editor gently suggested I send it to other trans women for sensitivity reads, and I just as gently refused, because I knew there was a strong chance that any given trans woman would hate my portrayal of a trans woman manipulator and grifter. 

Anyway, I spent a year (2020) looking for a new agent, and in the process rewrote the book several times. I actually despaired of finding an agent, and I turned to other things—I'd previously written two YA novels, so I pitched my YA editor on an idea about a trans girl attending a fancy all-girls school. They liked it and wanted to buy it, and I found now that I had an offer pending from a publisher, I was flooded with offers from agents who claimed to be excited about my literary novel as well! I realized something: when agents turn down your book, they might say all this stuff about how they can't empathize with the characters or it's poorly structured or whatever, but really all they care about is whether or not it'll sell. Conversely, if you present an agent with a sure thing, they get very excited and start telling you that all your other ideas are great too. I signed with my current agent in March 2021, and he sent out The Default World to publishers in early 2022. It sold on the third round of submission to Margot Atwell at Feminist Press.

2. You strike a strong balance, I found, between hilarious, vicious satire and empathy for your characters, even the techie hypocrites. How did you think of character in the novel? What was that writing process like?

Periodically there's discourse about "unlikable" characters in fiction. The smart, sophisticated reader isn't supposed to care about something so crass as character—they're supposed to care about, I dunno...how pretty the words are? Or something? The funniest thing is that editors have heard this discourse and now they'll send rejections that are like, "Although we love unsympathetic characters in fiction, we found it difficult to connect with your protagonist." 

I don't really get it. I think likability is important. I want to like the characters in the books that I read. But likability is very different from morality. Becky Sharp and Scarlett O'Hara are very likable! They're just immoral. Some characters, like the romance novelist Angel, in Elizabeth Taylor's novel, are unlikable, but powerful and charismatic. It's only a very small number of characters that are, to me, actively repellent (e.g. Ignatius in Confederacy of Dunces, who strikes me as a complete waste of skin). I loved Confederacy of Dunces, because it unapologetically skewered Ignatius, but it's an outlier. Usually if I like a book, I tend to like the characters, and if I like the characters, I'll like the book.

When it comes to The Default World, I know for a lot of people the characters read as satire (my mom told me flat-out that she didn't believe people like these polyamorous 'AlternaFest' goers really existed), but most of these people are just like my actual, real-life friends! I think they have a lot of charm! As Jhanvi says in the book, if you had lots of money, why wouldn't you throw fancy sex parties? Similarly, I admire Jhanvi's insistence on getting the good things in life, and I even admire clueless Roshie's cool, sexless competence. All the characters are slightly ridiculous, of course, but I don't think any of them are bad people, and I only want good things for them.

3. Is there anything you think modern fiction gets right or wrong about the trans experience that you hoped to convey in The Default World? 

Hmm, that's an interesting question. I find that most trans fiction elides the question of looks and passing. That's mostly because we don't want to concede an inch to our enemies. The most common reaction to trans women by our opponents is a visceral sense of disgust: to them, we look wrong and repulsive. We're men who've crammed our hairy thighs and broad shoulders into too-small dresses. It's a very intuitive reaction on their part, and all their logical justifications for transphobia are really posterior to that initial visual judgement. 

(As an aside this is very similar to how, say, Norman Podhoretz wrote about gay men in the 90s. The specifics of the policy, whether it was gay marriage or gays in the military or spending for HIV, didn't matter that much, what mattered more was registering the fact that he just didn't care for fags, and he thought gay sex was disgusting ["we live in a time when the obvious needs constantly to be restated, and so, to restate what was once self-evident to everyone, including most homosexuals themselves: men using one another as women constitutes a perversion"])

I don't think someone is a bad person if they find a non-passing trans woman to be not just unattractive, but also unnatural. Everyone is entitled to make their own aesthetic judgements. But I don't think your aesthetic judgement supersedes other people being able to access health care. The truth is that many trans women abhor their own appearance (just as many cis women abhor their own appearance). That doesn't mean our lives are unlivable or that transitioning has made our lives worse. It's simply a fact of life that most people don't have the bodies they wish they had! But it's striking that when it comes to the way cis people view us, our bodies are so front-and-center, but in trans fiction there's not much discussion of what it's like to be ugly and/or not pass (prettiness and passing aren't the same thing at all, but they're very connected in the minds of both cis and trans people).

4. You write extensively, in your Substack and elsewhere, on classic literature—from Plutarch to the 19th century Russians and beyond. This is a novel, of course, set in contemporary San Francisco. How— or if—did your reading of the canon inform your novel?

I would like to have a better answer than I do! Early drafts of The Default World were written in an omniscient style, with a lot more exposition—a style somewhat reminiscent of 19th-century novels. But agents kept saying they felt "distanced" from the action, so I eventually rewrote the book in a more-embodied close-third perspective. On my Substack, I've been playing around with a style that's more influenced by pre-modern and early-modern prose, and I'm really loving it! In a lot of ways, it feels like the development that my writing wanted to take with The Default World, but which the publishing industry wouldn't allow. 

5. You publish both adult literary fiction and YA fiction. There are a growing number of readers who happily consume both. How do your approaches to YA and literary fiction vary? What, consciously, must you do differently? And how are they alike?

YA is a very logical, sensible genre. All that publishers ask is that they be able to market your book as being similar to (or a combination of) other books that've succeeded. So long as they have the proper pitch for the book, they don't care what's actually in it. That gives you very wide latitude when it comes to selecting incidents, characters, scenes, etc, for the book itself, so long as you don't change the pitch for the book (i.e. if you sold it as a romantic comedy about a trans girl dating one of her former teammates on the football team, then it needs to keep that concept!). Literary fiction is very different. The pitch doesn't matter as much, and editors / agents tend to have a lot of ideas about how the book itself ought to be. My YA doesn't 'read' like a typical YA novel, and my publishers didn't necessarily care. But with literary fiction, I get the sense that if you don't write in the flowery, lyrical style typical of literary fiction, editors and agents just feel like you're a bad writer and aren't worth their time. In its pretense of not being a product, literary fiction ends up feeling very homogenous and artificial, because “smart book” is actually a much narrower category and much harder target to hit than “romantic comedy about a trans girl dating her former teammate on the football team.”

That being said, my YA has not been particularly commercially successful, and I'm not sure I'd have the easiest time selling another one! 

6. I need to ask you about Roshie whom (slight spoiler alert) I was rooting for to inflict serious harm on her spoiled housemates. This does or doesn't happen. (I will not spoil it!) How did you conceive of Roshie - her interiority, her motivations, her alienation (and sense of love)?

I really liked Roshie! But I think in real life most people would despise her. She's based on a person I knew who got kicked out of their social group. The kicker-outers had a lot of reasons for doing it, but I always felt that it was because they were young and attractive and all fucking each other at these sex parties, and she (my acquaintance) was older and quite fat.

You know, most people in real life if they see someone like Roshie, who's so desperate for love, they run the other way. Neediness is one of the most repulsive qualities a person can have. But I personally really respect someone who refuses to be ignored. Sometimes, the world drives you insane, and your only choice is whether to go insane in a corner by yourself, or to make a screaming, gibbering spectacle. I have much more admiration for the latter choice than for the former.

7. The tech milieu itself seems to have little regard for novels. Sam Bankman-Fried once infamously said any book could just be a blog post. What’s the case for the novel in the 2020s?

My most annoying encounters are with guys who have an Econ PhD or a Harvard MBA and who think that with a half-hour of thought they can Freakonomics their way into being bestselling authors. One guy, a former high school classmate who's now a data scientist for a tech company, told me, “Have you ever considered just writing the kind of book that people would like?”

These guys have a conceptual respect for art, but they don't understand art, artistry, or ethics at all, which is a bit worrisome! They simply don't get that some things are worth making even if people don't like them, that vox populi is not in fact vox dei. Which is weird, because oftentimes these guys don't have particularly democratic principles, and in fact think the average person is stupid. It's such a contradiction that these people have an aristocratic world-view, and yet they measure their own self-worth (and that of others) through the grossest possible measurements (book sales, volume of acclaim, income, wealth, amount of money their company has raised, etc). The thing is, you can't argue with people like this, because they don't respect your opinion at all. And yet, they're almost compelled to try and put me in my place and argue with me! That's because art, to them, represents a form of respect that they can never really capture. They know on some level that their own accomplishments are hollow, and they yearn to prove that artistic achievements are equally hollow. Almost all of the really uber-techie people I know would like to be artists, and many of them have music or artistic side-projects that they invest a lot of emotional energy into (think of, for instance, the CEO of Goldman Sachs moonlighting as a DJ). They don't really get that there's a spiritual interior to art--that success as an artist isn't about popularity, but about discovering some kind of metaphysical truth. The latter is something most real artists and writers intuitively get, which is why it's so frustrating when people don't. So, no, I don't have to defend art from tech, I find myself having to do something far harder, which is fight to distinguish true art from the weird, sad ideas that tech people have about art.

8. The Default World satirizes social justice pieties and a certain kind of very wealthy, out-of-touch, big city liberal. It feels we are now in a reaction period to a lot of the political enthusiasms of the 2010s. Was the novel intended a send-up to that period in particular or what was on your mind most at the time of composition?

You know...I generally steer a bit clear of anti-woke stuff. Because I write on Substack and don't call people out and generally don't adhere to political shibboleths, I occasionally get people who ask me, "Don't you hate how crazy and shrill all these trans activists are?" But to be honest, no, I don't hate that. I am happy and glad that a certain kind of out-of-touch big city liberal has taken trans rights to heart. They're the reason that California has passed a slew of laws in the last four years that've made life quite a bit easier for trans people. In fact, over the course of writing this novel, it actually became outdated! The surgeries that Jhanvi desperately wants are all covered by Medicaid and by the Obamacare health plans in California. Since she earns no money, she could easily get a subsidized Kaiser plan on the exchange and get all her procedures (including hair removal!) in two years, without any marriage plot needed! This is a HUGE change in the legal / health insurance framework. In almost no other place on Earth will health insurance cover hair removal, facial feminization, hair transplants, body contouring, etc. It's incredible that America contains such contrasts: Florida is one of the worst places in the West to be trans, while California is one of the best. I personally saved seventy thousand dollars when insurance unexpectedly came through on a surgery I'd thought I'd need to pay for out of pocket! 

These are amazing, amazing things for the trans community. It's funny because we have this state legislator, Scott Wiener, who the left absolutely hates, because he's Jewish and supports a two-state solution (i.e. he believes Israel has a right to keep existing as a Jewish state). My friends trash Scott constantly. I tell them: A) he's a state senator so who cares about his foreign policy stands; and B) he's the one who wrote and advocated for all these great pro-trans laws! The thing is, my friends who love Palestine are also pro-trans. They're the kind of people who, with their radical acceptance, moved the Overton window on trans rights to create the sort of world where Scott can pass these laws. They're the reason that in California you can, for instance, use a different bathroom or change your gender marker without undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. Because of activists, all kinds of amazing things are possible today (at least in California) for trans people that really were not possible even five years ago! Like, there's this amazing lawyer at the ACLU, Chase Strangio, who wrote one absurd tweet about free speech (he said an anti-trans book ought to be banned)--but he also crafted the legislative strategy that led Gorsuch, of all people, to write an opinion saying you can't be fired for being trans. The anti-woke folx HATE Chase Strangio and accuse him of ruining the ACLU, and I agree that his tweet was a bad one, but...he has made the world appreciably better for trans people. So I do think there's a role served in the political ecosystem by left-wing zealots and hypocrites and fools! I think it's possible to agree with what's good and mock what's bad. Most Substackers are happy when I make fun of the woke left, but they really don't want to hear that for me personally wokeness was very good. If I had to choose between Chase Stranglio and the anti-woke centrists, I would pick Chase in a second. How much sadder would it have been if the woke left had responded the way anti-woke centrists at the NYT and the Atlantic did, by scapegoating trans people and selling out our rights? I'm very glad that some group of people at least fought back and defended trans people, and anyone who spoke out for trans rights during these last five years gets quite a bit of credit with me.

At the same time, yeah, these people are funny. For instance...a friend of mine once belonged to an organization composed of rich kids who pledge to give up their inherited wealth so as to help other people. Later on, the friend got upset, because they aged out of the group (you have to be 18 to 35 to be a member). They screamed that it was ageist! Like, wait a second, your group that excludes people who don't have inherited wealth also excludes people for not being young and hot? What a shocking development! Similarly, I had a friend who was like, "I wish that I didn't have to gentrify a neighborhood just to find somewhere to live." Well, in the Bay Area, we have all these towns that are former sundown towns--non-white people weren't allowed to live there, and these towns are still 90+ percent white. I told her, "Why not live in Walnut Creek?" She said, "But I don't want to live in Walnut Creek". I said, "Okay...but you don't need to gentrify to find somewhere to live. There are white neighborhoods! You just don't want to live in them." Which is fine! I don't want to live in Walnut Creek either! But I don't go around complaining about gentrification, either. So yes there are a lot of funny things, and one does feel compelled to write about them.

And it's true that I often don't get along on a personal level with very activist-y people, and they definitely do not care for my fiction. If you read the reviews for my YA novels in particular, you'll find tons of people calling them homophobic, transphobic, etc--which I certainly find annoying. Mostly the trans and PoC writer community tends to ignore me; they can tell almost instantly, just from the words that I use (for example, I don't list my race, sexuality, or pronouns in my author bios), that I'm not one of them. As Freddie deBoer has said, the problem with left-wing activists is that you can agree 95 percent of their views, and they'll regard you as their enemy, while if you agree with even five percent of what a conservative activist says, they'll happily promote your book and invite you to speak on their podcast.

9. What do you make of Substack’s role in this new literary ecosystem? 

I am very fond of Substack. To be honest, getting published in mainstream outlets is way too much work. I've written for the LA Review of Books, LitHub, Tablet, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, and others. I've had short stories published all over the place. I have four books out, and another book coming next year. And for all these places, getting published has taken much more effort than the actual writing has. Compared to the work of dealing with agents and editors, writing is comparatively simple. I finally stopped pitching magazines and journals for nonfiction pieces because I found that this weird thing kept happening where I'd need to badger and harass the editors (and threaten to pull the piece) to get them to publish it. Now I don't want to do this! If you don't want to publish my piece, then don't publish it! But each time I threatened them, they'd insist no no they did want to publish it, and then yes it'd eventually get published! 

With Substack, I write something and schedule it for publication. It's all writing, no hassle. I love it. And although the number of eyeballs a piece gets is probably smaller than it'd get for, say, Slate, I get a lot more comments, a lot more feedback, and usually gain a few subscribers. For me, it feels much more productive and sustainable.

At the same time, it won't last forever. There's an algorithm at play here. Substack is basically a social network, and all social networks at their inception design their algorithm to be favorable to creators. But eventually, the time comes when they decide to squeeze creators. Instagram did it by making it impossible to get new followers unless you pay for advertising. Twitter and Facebook did it by nerfing outbound links, so their sites can't drive traffic to your own projects anymore. Spotify did it by creating their own music and directing their traffic to that music instead of to independent artists. They all do it eventually! Someday Substack will tighten up their algorithm, and it'll become impossible to gain new followers just by posting good writing. Which'll be annoying. But for now it's a lot of fun.

10. You’re working on a book now about the Great Books phenomenon. How is that project progressing and when can readers expect it? And are you working on any new novels, either adult or YA?

It's going well! I've written a draft, and I'm working through comments from my editor. Like a fool, I wrote my last draft without doing any citations, so now I'm having to put them in. Definitely won't make that mistake again. It should be out sometime next year! I think it's quite good, because I try to eschew some of the overheated rhetoric, you know? Like, yes, the Great Books are great: they will put you in direct contact with truth, beauty and goodness. But...the Great Books concept does raise some questions? Like...can only Plato put you in touch with truth, beauty or goodness, or will any philosopher do it? How can you touch truth, beauty and goodness by reading philosophers with diametrically opposed philosophies, like Nietzsche and Plato? Why do you need to read older books, why can't you just get truth, beauty, and goodness by reading contemporary new releases? 

As for novels, I'm not sure. I feel a bit burned out on them—just seems like nobody is that interested in reading, and publishers are having lots of trouble breaking out even books they expect to do very well. When it comes to my own work, which is inevitably midlist or small-press, the odds of getting any attention are much smaller. When it comes to fiction-writing, I'm putting a lot of my energy into the tales that I publish every Thursday on my Substack. They're not totally what most of my followers are coming for (most seem to prefer the critical essays I post on Tuesdays), but they've gotten an okay response, and it's an odd experience to actually have readers for my short stories. A friend was like, “The two thousand readers you get for a Substack short story are probably higher than it'd get in Ploughshares or The Kenyon Review.” I have this fantasy of somehow gaining traction and building a reputation for my tales, and somehow using that to get more attention for my fiction in general, but even in my fantasy world, I'm not totally sure how that'd work (an editor reads one of my tales and contacts me to do a short story collection?). I've told myself I'll do them for six months and then reassess. So far I'm at the start of month three, my subscriber count has doubled! But it may not be sustainable, who knows?